Maybe it'll clear up
Nov. 14th, 2009 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonneMy plan for today was to go to Easthampton (Western Mass, southwest of Northampton) and check out the Topatoco Open House. It's raining outside, it takes about two hours to get there and I'm not sure any of my other Noho friends are up for hanging out. Today is feeling more and more like a shop-at-home day.
Thursday and Friday at work went a lot better than Wednesday. I was productive, I learned things, I beat up real and virtual computers and explained what I learned. By Friday I could sense the learning curve's angle turning upward. They like me and they aren't being sarcastic. It's been a while since I felt this good.
I visited![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fangirl715 on Thursday evening while she was still in MGH. I lent her my small lappy, since she hadn't had Internet access in days and no one deserves that fate in a loud, sterile hospital. One might actually take the TV seriously after too long...
I also got my second paycheck on Friday. Since I've already rid myself of three old computers and a few small boxes of semi-computers, I felt ready to research an upcoming tower purchase. Actually, I'm not planning to buy a tower since I've got a couple emptiess -- just the CPU, matching motherboard, video card and RAM. If I can keep the price of the individual components lower than a full desktop machine, I'll consider it a victory.
This balance of prebuilt versus homebrew wasn't a problem a decade ago. Back in May of 1998 I bought my first Wintel box from a mom and pop joint twenty minutes outside Utica. It had a 200 MHz Pentium MMX (last year's new processor at the time), a 2.5 GB hard drive and 32 MB of RAM. It was a wicked cheap midtower at $900 (and an extra $300 for a 15" CRT). That price kicked the ass of anything we had been selling a year earlier when I still worked at Sears, Sears still sold computers (remember Packard Bell, or perhaps you knew them as Packard Smell or Taco Bell?) and none of us working there could afford the damn things -- $1400 to $2000 for a tower and monitor.
Now a decent tower with last year's processor can be $400 to $800 and today's machines are ridiculously faster than those of a dozen years ago. They have four cores on one processor, each running ten to fifteen times the speed of that MMX. They run 64-bit operating systems that can host other 64-bit virtual computers -- instead of 16-bit DOS with a 32-bit windowing shell and vague multitasking. I only knew one person that ran Linux on a PC back in the 1990s and he was a supragenius of computers. Today he's a father of two and I had the honor of teaching him about Gentoo back when I didn't hate it.
Computers depreciate ridiculously fast. At least a ten-year-old car can still get you to work, even when the repair job is worth more than the trade-in value. A computer of the same age often can't process enough RAM to run a modern operating system and a web browser.
Sometimes I would review my montagnard army of old servers and imagine I could take them back to 1994 with me. I would set up an ISP and make free money. Of course I'd have to bring my collection of 56k modem cards with me but it'd be fine. I could charge $20 per month for dial-up and put it in a bank that I knew was still around in 2009. Then I'd have to secure the office because the value would be in those space-age dual Pentium III machines that I'd scrounged in the future. It's delusions such as this one that led me to keep the montagnard army as long as I have.
Think about how little it took to run a 1990's local ISP: about half a rack of material. You get a T1 line from the phone company and a bunch of modems to connect to your network. Thus you'd put your office as close to the central office as possible just like Software Tool & Die did, or you'd be a competing local exchange carrier like my old ISP was.
Back in the real world, I just looked up that old MMX 200 CPU. It was built on a 350 nanometer fab, which is gigantic compared to the 90 nm fab of the Athlon64 x2 in my home desktop or the 45 nm fab of the i7. Electrons would lumber through those old paths, spilling lepton beer and picking fights with strange quarks.
Yeah, the rain just cranked up a notch and Storrow Drive is flooded. I'm going to research motherboards and CPUs instead of heading out. Today will also be good for sorting ancient hard drives for disposal. I'll start with the older, smaller drives since they're usually the heaviest and have the least number of items.
Thursday and Friday at work went a lot better than Wednesday. I was productive, I learned things, I beat up real and virtual computers and explained what I learned. By Friday I could sense the learning curve's angle turning upward. They like me and they aren't being sarcastic. It's been a while since I felt this good.
I visited
fangirl715 on Thursday evening while she was still in MGH. I lent her my small lappy, since she hadn't had Internet access in days and no one deserves that fate in a loud, sterile hospital. One might actually take the TV seriously after too long...I also got my second paycheck on Friday. Since I've already rid myself of three old computers and a few small boxes of semi-computers, I felt ready to research an upcoming tower purchase. Actually, I'm not planning to buy a tower since I've got a couple emptiess -- just the CPU, matching motherboard, video card and RAM. If I can keep the price of the individual components lower than a full desktop machine, I'll consider it a victory.
This balance of prebuilt versus homebrew wasn't a problem a decade ago. Back in May of 1998 I bought my first Wintel box from a mom and pop joint twenty minutes outside Utica. It had a 200 MHz Pentium MMX (last year's new processor at the time), a 2.5 GB hard drive and 32 MB of RAM. It was a wicked cheap midtower at $900 (and an extra $300 for a 15" CRT). That price kicked the ass of anything we had been selling a year earlier when I still worked at Sears, Sears still sold computers (remember Packard Bell, or perhaps you knew them as Packard Smell or Taco Bell?) and none of us working there could afford the damn things -- $1400 to $2000 for a tower and monitor.
Now a decent tower with last year's processor can be $400 to $800 and today's machines are ridiculously faster than those of a dozen years ago. They have four cores on one processor, each running ten to fifteen times the speed of that MMX. They run 64-bit operating systems that can host other 64-bit virtual computers -- instead of 16-bit DOS with a 32-bit windowing shell and vague multitasking. I only knew one person that ran Linux on a PC back in the 1990s and he was a supragenius of computers. Today he's a father of two and I had the honor of teaching him about Gentoo back when I didn't hate it.
Computers depreciate ridiculously fast. At least a ten-year-old car can still get you to work, even when the repair job is worth more than the trade-in value. A computer of the same age often can't process enough RAM to run a modern operating system and a web browser.
Sometimes I would review my montagnard army of old servers and imagine I could take them back to 1994 with me. I would set up an ISP and make free money. Of course I'd have to bring my collection of 56k modem cards with me but it'd be fine. I could charge $20 per month for dial-up and put it in a bank that I knew was still around in 2009. Then I'd have to secure the office because the value would be in those space-age dual Pentium III machines that I'd scrounged in the future. It's delusions such as this one that led me to keep the montagnard army as long as I have.
Think about how little it took to run a 1990's local ISP: about half a rack of material. You get a T1 line from the phone company and a bunch of modems to connect to your network. Thus you'd put your office as close to the central office as possible just like Software Tool & Die did, or you'd be a competing local exchange carrier like my old ISP was.
Back in the real world, I just looked up that old MMX 200 CPU. It was built on a 350 nanometer fab, which is gigantic compared to the 90 nm fab of the Athlon64 x2 in my home desktop or the 45 nm fab of the i7. Electrons would lumber through those old paths, spilling lepton beer and picking fights with strange quarks.
Yeah, the rain just cranked up a notch and Storrow Drive is flooded. I'm going to research motherboards and CPUs instead of heading out. Today will also be good for sorting ancient hard drives for disposal. I'll start with the older, smaller drives since they're usually the heaviest and have the least number of items.
